Eucalyptus 2.0

Recently, I had the chance to catch up with the Eucalyptus team, getting an overview of the new release and then a demo:

Interview

Mårten Mickos gives us the quick rundown of features: performance and scale improvements, storage versioning (as done with S3), and other enhancements and fixes.

You can also download the video directly, or subscribe to the RedMonk podcast feed to get it and the demo downloaded automatically.

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well, hello, everybody! Here we are at VMworld, it’s a packed expo center, which you can probably hear in the background a little bit, and I wanted to stop by the Eucalyptus booth here and get a sense of like what’s in the new release that you guys just came out with. But before we do that why don’t you introduce yourself.

Mårten Mickos: Hi! I am Mårten Mickos, the CEO of Eucalyptus.

Michael Coté: You have been on since March if I remember, right?

Mårten Mickos: That’s correct, yes.

Michael Coté: So how things have been going with Eucalyptus?

Mårten Mickos: So I am loving being back in business again, and of course, it’s hard work building a startup, but we’ve had a great time with new releases, good software, and our customers are just loving it.

Michael Coté: What exactly is in the new release in 2.0? What have you guys added to Eucalyptus?

Mårten Mickos: So the most important thing is that we are at 2.0 of production-ready GA software which — you don’t find many such products in the –

Michael Coté: In the cloud space, right?

Mårten Mickos: Yes, a cloud platform, we are very proud to already have come to release number 2. We have done lots of infrastructure improvements inside the code, cleaning up and making it faster and more scalable. So we have a great design originally, but then tuning the various components or modules to really make them perform well is just hard work that takes time.

Michael Coté: Getting it more performant and more scalable and all of that.

Mårten Mickos: Right, while keeping latency low. So it’s always balancing act between latency and throughput and scalability but I think we have a great balance there.

We have added features that our users and customers have been hoping for some time. So we have worked I/O support now in KVM, we have iSCSI support, we added S3 versioning which maybe a significant feature for everybody, but it shows how closely we match the Amazon Web Services API.

Michael Coté: And that’s a huge part of your ethos still?

Mårten Mickos: It is.

Michael Coté: And it’s really treating Amazon as sort of a spec if you will to write to.

Mårten Mickos: Right. We really see that’s the industry standard today, and whenever there is another industry standard we will quickly follow or add support for a new API, but it’s also important when you support an API to support it fully, which we do.

So the stuff you learn on Amazon you can readily apply on Eucalyptus too. So if it will work on one, it will work on the other. So it’s important to be very true to the original implementation and that’s what happening here in 2.0.

Michael Coté: Right, and the S3 versioning for people, it basically saves however many old versions of your file, kind of like Apple’s Time Machine, right? It’s just —

Mårten Mickos: Right, yeah, and now you could do it on Eucalyptus as well. Those are the main things in our 2.0 release, and we will fix the bunch of bugs that people are reporting to. So it’s just overall a great upgrade from the previous one.

Michael Coté: Right, so when someone gets Eucalyptus, I know it will come bundled with Ubuntu and various other things, but what — we are here at VMworld, and if I remember you guys work with VMware stuff and you kind of layer on top of other hypervisors and some stuff.

Mårten Mickos: We do.

Michael Coté: What’s kind of the list of existing infrastructure virtualization that Eucalyptus is coordinating and doing management over?

Mårten Mickos: So on VMware we feel we have the best cloud platform today on VMware’s hypervisor, and we also run on Xen and KVM. In the future we will add support for other architectures whenever they become relevant in the industry.

Michael Coté: I think that’s a pretty good quick update on what’s in 2.0.

Mårten Mickos: I hope so.

Michael Coté: And let’s see there was anything else you wanted to throw in.

Mårten Mickos: No, I’d like to give you a demo, or I won’t give you the demo, but my colleagues will be happy to give you a demo.

Michael Coté: Yeah, well, it’s always good to see the proof in the pudding.

Mårten Mickos: Exactly!

Michael Coté: So that’s the good stuff. Well, thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

Mårten Mickos: Thanks Michael!

Demo

After the quick overview, the demo goes over using Eucalyptus from several different perspectives, and also an architectural overview. If you’d just like to see parts of the demo on their own, see the architecture, admin, and then user portions.

You can also download the video directly, or subscribe to the RedMonk podcast feed to have it and the overview downloaded automatically.

Disclosure: Eucalyptus is a client and sponsored this video.